Martin Fichter, the acting president of HTC America, spoke at the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle about a wide range of topics, including Windows Phone 7.

Noting that the iPhone is now so ubiquitous that it is losing its cachet and cool, he recounts:

â€œ I brought my daughter back to college â€” sheâ€™s down in Portland at Reed â€” and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: â€˜My dad has an iPhone.â€™ Thereâ€™s an interesting thing thatâ€™s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufactureâ€™s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids donâ€™t find them that cool anymore.â€

On Windows Phone 7 he revealed an unexpected Achilles heel for the OS.

â€It has shortcomings in some areas, so I am quite happy to see how Mango has improved all of that. I think Windows Phone 7 is probably a bit hampered by the whole energy in the industry right now for 4G. All the carriers are pushing their 4G networks and with Windows Phone 7 not yet supporting that â€¦ there is a shortcoming there that is not so much a problem for the end-consumer, but it is a problem for the consumer not being pushed towards Windows because another phone might be more attractive to cell phone carriers.â€

I suspect as US head of HTC he is likely revealing a real issue which is preventing carriers like Verizon, who is now heavily promoting LTE, from increasing Windows Phone 7 adoption.

4G is more a marketing term than a real technology, and it seems that Microsoft is not in sync with the agenda of the carriers to move customers to more expensive higher tier data plans for only slightly faster downloads, all the time removing their unlimited data plans.

Do our readers think Windows Phone 7 is suffering from not having LTE handsets in the market yet? Let us know below.